The invention relates to fault diagnosis.
Critical hardware failures in a computer system may occur in components such as a fan, a power supply, a central processing unit (CPU) or memory boards, or an I/O bus. Typically, a non-maskable interrupt (NMI) or system management interrupt (SMI) is generated to handle the failure. When an SMI or NMI is asserted, the CPU is aware that a catastrophic failure has occurred which necessitates the shut-down of the computer system.
Other types of failures can also be detected in a computer system. For example, the bus agents on a Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) bus include data error detection logic (e.g., parity error checker), which asserts a parity error signal PERR.sub.-- if the data error is detected. The PERR.sub.-- signal is shared among the PCI agents. Catastrophic errors on the PCI bus, such as an address parity error, can be reported by asserting a system error (SERR) signal, which may cause the NMI to be asserted to the CPU.